video

Kickstarter has emerged as the go-to platform for crowdfunding online. In 2011, they received nearly $100 million in pledges and over a million backers. With these numbers, crowdfunding through Kickstarter can be a great way to raise awareness about your project and build momentum around your cause.

Here are a just few great journalism proposals on Kickstarter which span a wide range of voices. Do your part and pledge your support to any or all of these campaigns! If there’s a Kickstarter campaign which focuses on journalism, please let us know!

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Author and journalist Susan Orlean (left) has written two nonfiction pieces that have been turned into films. She’ll discuss her new book, Rin Tin Tin, in Mediabistro’s first online Literary Festival & Workshops starting July 16. Other speakers include Rebecca Skloot, Jason Boog, and Jason Allen Ashlock. Register now.

We knew it was only a matter of time until this meme turned the spotlight on journalists. [h/t Stuff Journalists Like]

Bonus: TVSpy discovered “Sh*t News Reporters Say.” Compare and contrast.

The editorial board of New Jersey’s largest newspaper, The (Newark, N.J.) Star-Ledger, has taken to a new story form to express its point of views: the animatorial.

It’s an editorial that’s in animated video form. The result is amusing, hilarious and a surprisingly effective storytelling method.

The production values are pretty corny. It’s cheesy text-to-speech animated figures on a real-life background. But the story (in this case about toll hikes) is told in a way that anyone can understand. It speaks to the viewer more than a traditional text-based editorial would.

For a video to be an effective storytelling tool, it need not have tons of bells and whistles. Instead, it needs to be well-written and understandable. And that’s exactly what these animatorials are. Read more

Finding success on YouTube can often be a difficult thing to do. There are tons of different variables that can make or break your video — whether it’s a 15-secon d clip or something you consider a masterpiece.

Luckily, YouTube itself is here to help. They’ve produced a little-known bible for content creators, the YouTube Creator Playbook.

This is not a playbook for beginners. It includes tips for engagement, uses terms like “tent-pole programming” and gives a detailed look at YouTube’s analytics package. Read more

A few months ago, we gave some tips on how to define your mobile newsroom presence. One of those tips talked about keeping Flash at a minimum for mobile devices:

While there are mobile devices which can run Flash, using Flash should be avoided for both mobile sites and applications. For video, recent studies show that HTML 5 outperforms Flash on mobile devices.

Yesterday, Adobe announced that they will be ceasing development of the mobile version of Flash Player for mobile browsers in order to continue their focus on HTML5. This is huge news for any organization which uses Flash for mobile websites to deliver multimedia content or interactive graphics.

According to Adobe VP Danny Winokur, “HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.” While these are strong words from Adobe, it’s important to note that any organization that begins to transition its Flash content to HTML5 must keep two important thoughts in mind.

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